> The vast majority of sales is still paper books.
Do you have numbers for this? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if paper book revenue dwarfed ebook sales, but given that the latter has no marginal cost, I expect that profit from ebooks is still a very large slice of the pie.
Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).
> Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell.
A new author with no established celebrity or audience is basically dead in the water. There was a world where a new author could:
1. Write a book that was good on its own merits.
2. Convince an agent to represent them based on that book's merits.
3. The agent convinces an editor at a well-known publisher to take it.
4. The publisher prints it and gets it on bookshelves in stores everywhere.
5. People looking for books stumble onto it and buy it.
That world existed when people had a lot of spare time and attention and relatively few things vying for it. That world no longer exists. You can consume media 24/7 and never come close to running out, all without spending a penny.
The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.
> From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.
There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.
To sales numbers, you're right that revenue skews it somewhat, but see [1] and [2]. Per 2022, print books added up 788 million sold, while e-books did did 191 million in 2020.
2020 was also a big jump up - in 2019 it was 170, after years of decline for e-book sales from a peak of 242 million in 2014. A large part of that is likely explained by the price gap narrowing, as publisher realised they were leaving money on the table.
> Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).
This is true for almost all self-published books, because realistically your books are not going to be in many - if any - book stores. But most of the best-selling trad published books are. So for self-published authors, focusing on e-books is certainly the way that is most likely to drive actual sales. Sure, you can get some copies into local book stores, and encourage fans to request them elsewhere, but you need pretty decent numbers already to shift that balance without an established publisher behind you.
> The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.
That's true, but somewhat less true for trad published authors where you at least has the shot at getting it into reasonable numbers of book stores. But of course the odds against getting through to a trad published have gotten far worse.
> There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.
That's true, but when it comes to writing the reality is most of us can't hope to live off it anyway, and that creates freedoms we don't otherwise have. E.g. I am not bothering trying to sell individual copies and do book signings or talk to book stores, because I don't need the sales bump it might bring, and so it's all about a balance between keeping it enjoyable and the fun of at least a little bit of recognition and feedback on occasion.
Do you have numbers for this? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if paper book revenue dwarfed ebook sales, but given that the latter has no marginal cost, I expect that profit from ebooks is still a very large slice of the pie.
Anecdotally, with my two self-published books, ebook and PDFs make up a pretty large slice of the pie even though my books are known for prioritizing the print experience (careful layout, lots of illustrations, etc.).
> Some do. Most don't. Especially new authors. Publishers are playing a risky game of trying to figure out the tradeoff of how much to invest in developing an authors brand in the hope that future books will cost less to sell.
A new author with no established celebrity or audience is basically dead in the water. There was a world where a new author could:
1. Write a book that was good on its own merits.
2. Convince an agent to represent them based on that book's merits.
3. The agent convinces an editor at a well-known publisher to take it.
4. The publisher prints it and gets it on bookshelves in stores everywhere.
5. People looking for books stumble onto it and buy it.
That world existed when people had a lot of spare time and attention and relatively few things vying for it. That world no longer exists. You can consume media 24/7 and never come close to running out, all without spending a penny.
The days of just having to write a great book and get in front of two people to be successful are dead and gone.
> From what I see, most authors (myself included) would rather not deal with most of what publishers do. If anything, most authors would prefer it if publishers did more of the sales effort, but it's not economically viable in most cases.
There's a lot of stuff most people would rather not do, but unfortunately, sometimes the economic systems don't enable that.